Famous Quotes & Sayings

Elizabeth Gilbert

They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.

John Bunyan

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

Joan Baez

Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don't sit down and shut up once in a while we'll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

Susan Sontag

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Susan Sontag

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Robert Musil

Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.

Victor Hugo

There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

Victor Hugo

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.

Robert Foster Bennett

The concept of the "good ol' days" must be one of our society's biggest delusions, top reasons for depression, as well as most often used excuse for lack of success.

Richard Marx

I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.

Sally Field

I certainly have a very colorful nature, filled with great highs and great lows... in my early adulthood I probably was grappling with some serious depression issues.

Susan Polis Schutz

Getting better from depression demands a lifelong commitment. I've made that commitment for my life's sake and for the sake of those who love me.

Stuart Symington

Well over fifty years ago I was making radio loudspeakers and radio sets in Rochester, New York; pretty young and inexperienced; but we survived the depression.

Robertson Davies

May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.

Robert M. Pirsig

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.

Susanna Kaysen

... now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.

Susanna Kaysen

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

Susanna Kaysen

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.

Suzanne Collins

Something small and quiet, like a match being struck, lights up the gloom inside of me.

Stephen King

Madness is a kind of mental suicide.

Stephen King

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

Stephen King

He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it ...

Stephen King

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

Steve Buyer

From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories

Spencer Tracy

I'm tired of pretending that everything's fine just so I can please everyone else.

Spike Milligan

I have got so low that I have asked to be hospitalized and for deep narcosis (sleep). I cannot stand being awake. The pain is too much... Something has happened to me, this vital spark has stopped burning - I go to a dinner table now and I don't say a word, just sit there like a dodo. Normally I am the centre of attention, keeps the conversation going, - so that is depressing in itself. It's like another person taking over, very strange. The most important thing I say is 'good evening' and then I go quiet.

Pope John Paul II

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Pink

In my experience the best way to beat depression is to get involved in something inspiring.

Stanley Kubrick

The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

Stephenie Meyer

I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflex. I wasn't trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn't Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.

Stefan Zweig

I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.